Question about dial up

[RethcirYor]

Has anybody played lotro on dialup? Is it possible? Will it just be frustrating and not worth it? Anybody have any experience w/ this, thx for replies!!

[TsarithArcher]

As I've been playing the game for over 2 years on a 65k ADSL Connection, I might be one of the few who has the closest long-term experience with near Dial-Up speeds.

The game runs fine at that slow of a network connection. Even when my daughter is playing LOTRO along with me on the same connection, it is fine.

The only time it blows monkey chunks is:

a.) Updates and Expansions. I dread Book Updates that might be greater than 1 Gig in size. If I update through my ADSL connction it takes forever. I've had to get in the habit of using a "sneaker net" to get my Updates and Expansions...downloading at work, copying files to a thumbdrive, and copying them on my home computer.

b.) Raids, Instances and the Moors. None of these are unplayable. However, when you first enter any of these there seems to be a HUGE initial spike in bandwidth used. My machine locks up entering any of these waiting for all the packets to be received. For 6 man Raids the lock up is about 10 seconds. No biggie. For full-sized Raids it's about a minute (although some of them used to take up to 5 minutes but that might have been a graphical issue). The Moors takes about 2-3 minutes. Basically, the more people in an Instance, the longer it takes to pull the necessary data. Once the initial lock up is over, it's smooth sailing the rest of the way.

c.) 21st Hall in Moria. Same story as above with Raids and Instances, but it is a combination of Bandwidth + Graphical Overhead = Can't Do Anything (after hours I can, but during peak times, fah-get-about-it). Everyone else in the game has insane lag in this same area, so it's not just me and not just the slow bandwidth to blame, although it certainly doesn't seem to help.

For the most part, very little is being transmitted back and forth between the server and client to where a 33.6-56K Dial Up would be more than sufficient (like I said, 65K handles two LOTRO users simultaneously just fine with the above mentioned caveats). Latency really is more important than bandwidth speed when it comes to MMOs.

[RethcirYor]

That is outstanding advice, I was worried about the moors, cuz I play there alot, and expansions I'd already thought of putting them on a cdrom or sumthing...Great advice Tsarith, much appreciated!!

=)